Digital Warfare, Identity and Estrangement: Spec Ops’ Brechtian Interventions in Post-9/11 War Games

How do games construct, and intervene in, the practices and ideology of warfare? Back when I first joined a virtual army, games were still decidedly trivial. Context was arbitrary: Contra’s premise (Konami, 1988) was arbitrary, even irrelevant. Its Japanese version had Bill fighting an unnamed hostile nation; the American version staged Lance fighting aliens. Either way, it did not affect playing the game much. 14 years later, playing a soldier in Metal Gear Solid 2 (Konami, 2002), Solid Snake addressed me personally and, after reflecting on my playing the game – addressing me as the “embodied gamer” behind the screen (Higgin, 2010), made me wonder how convincing games’ simulation of soldierhood had become. Snake openly wonders that the illusion of virtual training might act “to remove you from the fear that goes with battle situations” (Konami, 2002). “War as a video game—” he wonders, “what better way to raise the ultimate soldier?” (ibid.). As if to prove a point, a month later, in that same year on the fourth of July, the American army released America’s Army (U.S. Army, 2002), a promotional game for the United States’ armed forces – at once both didactic tool and recruitment platform. In the wake of 9/11, the conceptual category of the ‘terrorist’ has developed, in parallel, as a dominant cultural trope and video game mechanism. What I propose to do in my talk is to conduct a threefold analysis centring around the design of identification and Verfremdung in a medium that takes the player-protagonist relation as a fundamental function of its semiosis. That is: first, how does the player-subject relate to the act of game-play? Second, how do the conventions of simulated warfare focalize an unquestioned loyalty to a nationalist, exceptionalist apparatus, fighting the faceless aggressor of reified Terrorism? Third, how have critical wargames such as Spec Ops: the Line (Yager Development, 2012) sought, instead, to enstrange their ‘embodied players’ from the rule- and narrative-governed actions of game-play? My main argument is that the increased engagement of digital games in the arenas of the Political (cf. Mouffe, 2005) as propaganda and training tools has led to wargames such as Spec Ops that, conversely, seek to utilize theatrical techniques of enstrangement [Verfremdung] in order to re-familiarize players with the violence and social injustices of 21st Century warfare. My methodology draws fundamentally on the works of Viktor Shklovsky, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin (on enstrangement), Michel Foucault (on governance and subjectivity), Mieke Bal and Ernst van Alphen (on the split subject of ideology from narratology), on the works of Frans-Willem Korsten, Keir Elam and Jesper Juul (regarding the relationship between simulation, (re)presentation and semiosis) and on Miguel Sicart’s earlier books on simulating morality (2009, 2013). Even more important to my approach, however, are my case studies, which serve simultaneously to problematize critical theories while simultaneously making them insightful and concrete. A practice that, throughout these early decades of game studies, has been considerately de-emphasized.status: accepte